Image by Midjourney
DREAM
I'm an explorer in a large submarine. All of a sudden, the submarine starts to shake and flip upside down and side to side, and we're crashing. One of us has locked the others in a room. We watch in horror as he paces up and down the viewing window, cackling. He explains his evil plan, showing us how he's put some strange chemicals in the tubing we use for air. The tubes are filled with a magenta-colored substance.
Then we're at the surface. It's calm. All of that stuff with the evil scientist is behind us, and we're inspecting the tubes he left behind for us. I hesitantly reach into one tube. I pull out seaweed. It's just algae and kelp in the tube. Maybe we'll be okay.
Now, I'm in a lab with a lot of sophisticated machinery. I check the results of a test. A yellow, gum-like substance is in my magenta, gloved hand.
It's radioactive.
I leave the lab to discuss this with the two men who have been waiting for me at a dining room table. In the dream, it only just dawns on me that this person whose point of view I've had is actually me--I am the scientist. I connect to that identity in thought and emotion.
One man wears a broad smile that spreads deep crow's feet on his boyish face. He's in a brown polo shirt, and he's happy.
The other man seems calm. He's probably in his 50s, with dark hair, a large nose, sun spots, and a kind face. He's dressed like an environmental scientist coming back from the field.
I tell the environmental scientist, "It's radioactive."
His friend, who was chatty only a moment ago, becomes quiet, and sombre.
We all know the implications: this stuff has been in his body. He's in trouble.
He takes it gracefully, but might simply be in denial. He thanks me, and I know he knows this is very bad news, but he avoids the topic and continues to talk about work.
Then, I'm telling my professor that I don't want to do any of the things my boyfriend wants to do. And I'm watching a reality TV show--or at least I think it is. Emilia Clarke is sitting outside in a grass-filled garden eating little tea party confectionary treats that are tinted a pastel blue. She's there for some kind of rehabilitation, and she narrates her inner experiences of suffering and pain over the camera shots. The cameras follow her as she goes out into the city, but everything warps, and bends, and twists. I find it a strange thing to do to have such hard-core special effects on a reality TV show. What are they trying to say by including this?
The camera cuts to an Emo young man wearing braces, who holds out a large rubber band with crystal letters on it. Most of the letters are nonsense, but there is a word there that I can't remember. He talks very conspiratorially with the other cast members about how difficult Emilia was at the start of the show.
INTERPRETATION
I think this dream is about my recovery from fleeing my hometown over 10 years ago.
My thoughts about the nature of evil have changed a lot over the years. When I was 22, I had a part in a play where I played a woman who betrayed her cheating husband to the enemy, who then blinded him, and he killed himself. I played her as though she knew exactly how evil what she was doing was, and she didn't care.
I had a heckler in the audience (yes, a heckler for a university play), who shouted out in the middle of my monologue, "Evil!"
Of course. It seemed obvious to me that handing over your husband to a warring people to be murdered, no matter what he'd done, was evil. The character had to know it was evil.
How naive I was about the nature of evil! In reality, I've found that almost all evil is unselfaware. It's usually justified into something righteous by its perpetrators, and they often don't just think they're good people, they think they're better people. And it works because you can kind of justify anything if you don't bother to develop your sense of ethics and let your emotions decide.
That night after the play, the director instructed me to figure out a way to make the character not evil, and it seemed impossible then. She left town the next day, pretty much, so I didn't have to try. But I'm shaking my head now. I think I know exactly how to make the character justify basically killing her husband: just feel victimized so strongly, and have such a powerful belief in your own heroism that you get into delusional territory. People will even feel sorry for you. They must've written her with the thought that she wasn't evil in mind, too, otherwise the directors (who wrote the play) wouldn't be asking me to play her as not evil!
There is a very distinctive feeling that I get about evil being "after" me, like when a Karen complains about me at my minimum wage job, or when my evil ex-roommate goes around the school spreading rumors about me, or when a teacher decides that they're going to use their power to harm me (or someone else--I've been savvy enough to dodge that bullet a couple times, often watching or hearing about it hitting another student). I think this is the same feeling I got when that scientist was cackling through the window about how he'd ruined our air.
Then I think about the guy in the dream who got the news about radioactive substances being in his body. It surprises me when people just have no reaction to horrible things sometimes. I would actually say that it happens a lot. With the evil ex-roommate, I was certainly not the first victim. She ran around harming lots of people. You know what they typically did afterwards? Absolutely nothing. They'd usually do something kind of small and shitty that they were ashamed about, and that usually silenced them from speaking out against her. But it's just not in everyone's nature to cause a bunch of drama when things go wrong in their life.
I noticed that calm people were my colleagues in the dream. Maybe that's because it's so much easier for me to genuinely love non-dramatic people, even though I typically get sucked in by the dramatic ones. I think it's common for our attention to go to the least deserving areas of our lives.
And I think Emilia Clarke in the reality TV show is me writing my way to some kind of healing after pretty much fleeing my hometown and all the awful people I got involved with. (For people in other countries who might not know: reality TV has no relationship to the very, very old tradition in English literature for writing autobiographical material. I think it might not be common in every country for people to write extensively about the unique details of their personal and family lives. But in America, we're doing it pretty much straight from day one in kindergarten, and a lot of our most revered authors do it until they die. Maybe it's part of being in an individualistic culture. I don't know. I'm not well-versed in the literature or educational systems of other countries, so I could be wrong about other countries working really different from ours in these areas.)
I think this is a topic that's been on my mind, because I'm reading a book called How to FAIL at Stand-Up Comedy: Avoiding the Pitfalls that Kill a Comic's Career, and I am stunned to see just how many people in this author's career have started very serious drama. As one example, the author said he's been assaulted either on stage or in the parking lots of his shows twelve times. All the behind-the-scenes drama totally reminds me of the social atmosphere I had to deal with in college in my hometown.
I guess it just surprises me that people can be so different. It's easy to make the mistake of thinking all people will react to things the same way you would. I'd say it's almost a mistake to try to predict what people will say or think or do at all. No one is truly an expert on that, no matter how much they charge for their services. It's going to be anecdotal, or statistical at best.
I also watched this video yesterday that got me thinking about the differences between people:
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